Contrived Coincidences in Fiction don't bother me

They really don't.  In Patrick Willems' notorious Plot Holes videos he says they're acceptable at the start of a story but not at the finish, I can't even concede that.  I think a lot of people underestimate just how many resolutions that everyone loves have a level of contrived coincidence to them.

Describing the T-Rex saving the day at the end of Jurassic Park as a Deus Ex-Machina isn't really true, not only was she part of the story but she was really too important not to feature into the climax.  But it was awfully coincidental, she was last seen on the other side of a now reactivated fence.

And it just occurred to me as I was working on this post that that ending qualifies as a Eucatastrophe, a term J.R.R. Tolkien coined.

Eucatastrophe is a neologism coined by Tolkien from Greek ευ- "good" and καταστροφή "destruction".

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."

― Letter 89

In his On Fairy-Stories Tolkien describes eucatastrophe further:

"But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality."

― On Fairy-Stories

And indeed the most notorious Eucatastrophe Tolkien wrote is largely a contrived coincidence.

Ya know what really ancient narrative can be accused of being very contrived?  The Book of Esther.  Think about it, so much of the book revolves around things like the King having just randomly read the right random thing in the chronicles at exactly the right time.

The late Chuck Missler used to say in response to those objecting to Esther because God is never directly mentioned, that Esther is all about how coincidences are God working undercover.  And since I support Death Of The Author I can apply that theory about coincidences to any fictional Coincidence that helps save the day in a story I really like whether their secular writers like me doing that or not.

"What about Coincidences that result in bad things happening?" you may retort, well Romans 8 which Chuck Missler also liked to quote, says "All Things Work Together for Good".  Ya know I'm surprised we don't mention that verse more often when arguing for Universal Salvation.

Let me end this post with one particular contrived coincidence I like that many fellow fans of that Anime may have never thought to think of as one.  Back in June I made a post on the character arc of Misaka Mikoto in A Certain Scientific Railgun S.

Spoilers below.

 In summery it's about her learning the importance of turning to her friends for help.  During the Febri Arc, the third act of the season, in episode 21 Misaka is thinking of doing again exactly what she did in the prior arcs and try to handle everything by herself.  But then at exactly the right moment Kongo calls her to talk about something perfectly relevant, by sheer coincidence.  And that helps her make the right decision in that end.

I've watched most episodes of this show 3 times now, on both the second and 3rd viewing this Chuck Missler on Esther argument entered my mind when this scene came up.

Pretty Cure movies and the Miracle Lights

I've noticed that among the people actually talking about the Pretty Cure franchise on English Language YouTube there is an intense hatred of the Miracle Lights which play a role in most of the PreCure movies.  This really bugs me.

First I feel like noting how none of PreCure's western fan-base has ever actually got to see any of these movies in their initial theatrical release, so none of us have experienced what that sequence is actually supposed to be like.  And related to that is how really none of the Western Fan-base has ever been into PreCure while actually being in the intended target audience's age range.

James Rolfe has often lamented about how movies and movie theaters generally don't try to do anything interactive anymore like in the Rob Corman days.  This is the kind of thing he's talking about.

First and foremost the Miracle Lights sequences always reminds me of the audience clapping to bring Tinker Bell back to life in the original Stage Play of Peter Pan.  Movie incarnations of Pan always struggle with how explicitly they want to break the Fourth Wall for that scene, and I really want one to some day just Do It..

This is why I love the Miracle Lights sequence, and I envy those who actually get to see these movies in theaters twice a year.

What have I been up to?

I watched Godzilla King of The Monsters recently and it was great.

For Anime I've spent a lost of the last few days re-watching Steins;Gate, that show totally holds up on re-watch, Replay Value started doing a series of Analysis videos on the show.  And I watched it via Sony Crackle, though it doesn't have the OVAs movie or 0.

And I just before starting this post watched the first two episodes of Seraph of The End, it's interesting.  That was also done via Sony Crackle.

For weekly shows I'm currently following.

YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world continues to get more intriguing with each episodes, it really annoys me that this was among the Spring shows most people ignored.

A Certain Scientific Accelerator has not disappointed, Raildex is continuing to strive for being my new favorite franchise.

Symphogear XV is pretty good, if this does turn out to be the last season I think it'll be satisfying one.

And then I'm following the Adult Swim releases for Gundam The Origin (which I already saw in it's OVA form) and Lupin III Part V.  The latter is proving to be a more then worthy addition to the franchise.

I've also been checking out other Lupin stuff from time to time.  Besides the Red Jacket series I've seen everything Dubbed it's currently possible for me to see.  So seeing more Red Jacket is my priority lately when I get in a Lupin mood.

I feel bad about how many shows of the last few seasons I wound up dropping.  I hope for Fall I do better.

Tolkien and Wagner?

First I want to say that I haven't seen the recent Tolkien biopic and so am not at all influenced by it's contribution to this controversy.

The question of whether or not Tolkien was influenced by Richard Wagner, a famous 19th Century German Composer, has long been a matter of debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influences#Wagnerian_influences

 Some critics have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was directly and heavily derived from Richard Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, whose plot also centres on a powerful ring.^[54] Others have argued that any similarity is due to the common influence of the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied on both authors.^[55][56]

Tolkien sought to dismiss critics' direct comparisons to Wagner, telling his publisher, "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." According to Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, the author claimed to hold Wagner's interpretation of the relevant Germanic myths in contempt, even as a young man before reaching university.^[57]Some researchers take an intermediate position: that both the authors used the same sources, but that Tolkien was influenced by Wagner's development of the mythology,^[58][59] especially the "concept of the Ring as giving the owner mastery of the world that was Wagner's own contribution to the myth of the Ring".^[60] Wagner probably developed this element by combining the ring with a magical wand mentioned in the Nibelungenlied that could give to its wearer the control "over the race of men".^[61][62] In addition, the corrupting power of Tolkien's One Ring has a central role in Wagner's operas but was not present in the mythical sources.^[63][64]

Some argue that Tolkien's denial of a Wagnerian influence was an over-reaction to the statements of Åke Ohlmarks, Tolkien's Swedish translator, who in the introduction to his much-criticized translation of The Lord of the Rings "mixed material from various legends, some which mention no ring and one which concerns a totally different 

ring".^[65][66][67] Furthermore, critics believe that Tolkien was reacting against the links between Wagner's work and Nazism.^[68][69]

The character who Wagner (And Fate/) fans usually know as Siegfried is who Tolkien fans usually know as Sigurd.

Most of this debate is about the Ring Cycle/Volsung Saga.  However I made a post nearly 4 years ago called The Holy Grail and The Silmarills, in which I argued the Silmarills, particularly the one Beren and Luthian obtain that winds up in the possession of Earendil and Elwing, was inspired by a Germanic alternative Grail tradition that began with Wolfram Von Eschenbach's Parzival.  However it's not fully developed in Parzival alone.

Richard Wagner composed an Opera adaptation of Parzival called Parsifal.  I have never watched this Opera, but from my googling it seems it does include the Grail being a Jewel of Lucifer's Crown detail.  Once again I site Jason Colavito.
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-holy-grail-as-lucifers-crown-jewel.html

So I do think Wagner was an influence, but nothing in Tolkien is a one for one allegory of what he was inspired by, it all changes and blends together.

But what I'm most interested in is the main reason Tolkien may have wanted to distance himself from Wagner by the 30s and 40s.  Hitler and other leading Nazis as well as their spiritual fore-bearer Houston Steward Chamberlain were huge Wagner fanboys.  Tolkien in-spite of his own reactionary tendencies absolutely hated the Nazis.

I don't think Wagner would have approved of the Nazis either, even Chamberlain never actually met him (he only married his daughter).

Wagner was guilty of some casual Antisemitism, debates about characters in his Operas being coded negative Jewish stereotypes are not settled, but we know he was mainly because of a piece of non-Fiction he wrote that was mostly just him saying Jews can't make good Music.  Which is mostly just proof he never saw Fiddler On The Roof.  He was a Lutheran which means Luther's antisemitism could have influenced him as well.  But Conspiratorial Antisemitism began emerging after the Dreyfus affair that started in 1894, over a decade after he died.  I don't think Wagner would have supported the Holocaust.

Some have even argued for a Marxist reading of Wagner.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/montefiore/1902/07/wagner.htm
So the Nazis and other Right-Wing German Nationalists were into the Aesthetics of Wagner, not the Substance.

In the modern context of comparing early 20th Century Fascism to the Alt-Right, what happened to poor Wagner I view as parallel to the Alt-Right's appropriation of Anime.  Too many normies are now assuming an Anime Avatar on Twitter always means being a Trump supporter.  But a lot of Anime is inherently Counter Culture, there is no way to form a Conservative reading of Ikuhara, YuriKuma Arashi is both pro-Gay and pro-Immigration, Penguindrum and Sarazanmai are heavily anti-Capitalist and Utena is absolutely anti-Patriarchy.  For examples of Leftist Anitubers just look at Pedantic Romanic and Zeria (both Lesbian Trans Women) as well as Shonen Ronin and Posadist Pacman.

Fitting then that Anime is one of the few places modern Media references Richard Wagner without intending it to be a Nazi reference, most recently in the new Boogiepop and Others (Digi thought the Wagner references were removed because he didn't make it far enough).  In Hollywood Rise of the Valkyries is always used as a musical Godwin's Law.  Sadly the Anime Abandon episode on Harlock Saga states the Tolkien and Wagner connection as fact without acknowledging that there is dispute about it.

Does the Principality of Zeon qualify as Fascist?

[Update October 2025: This post is very out of sync with how I currently define things, so it's best left forgotten.]

Nebula in Avengers Endgame

Infinity War was the first Superhero movie to actually feel like an Event Comic as a movie.  It wasn't the first named after an Event Comic, but the Civil War movie is much smaller in scale then the Comic was, it felt like less then a normal Avengers movie not more.

Avengers Endgame however managed to feel even more like an Event Comic.  In truth both movies together are the Event, and the post credit scenes of Antman & The Wasp and Captain Marvel are the cinematic equivalent of the tie in Comics.

Endgame is something that does not work as a stand alone film, even Infinity War could kind of work on it's own.  But in Endgame things like most of the cast not being there till the final act yet being treated as of equal importance once they show up could never work as a stand alone film.  But in this case that isn't a bad thing, because the meaning it has is worth it.

Again, my experience with Comics are almost all DC ones, so I'm a weirdo loving these Marvel movies for recreating the experience I get from some of my favorite DC Comics.

No Event Comic actually succeeds in making every one of it's hundreds of characters equally important, you have to accept that sometimes your favorite character might get just a couple cool moments.  What can be interesting is how some Events are quite surprising in who gets to be important.

In the main DC Events the big three are always important, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, for the MCU those are Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, and the Endgame Video Essays on YouTube I've seen so far have mainly been about how their meta arcs came to satisfying conclusions.

But after that things can seem random, like the group of heroes and villains the Monitor originally assembled for Crisis On Infinite Earths, or Power Girl and Superboy's importance to Infinite Crisis.  And in Endgame one example of that is Ant-Man's key role in how the resolution became possible.  But what's most fascinating to me is Nebula.

In the first two Guardians of The Galaxy films Nebula is an important supporting character, but still there mostly as an accessory to Gamora's character development and what their relationship infers to the audience about Thanos, and it's the same in Infinity War but with even less Screen-time.

But in Endgame she is now part of the core avengers team, we open with her having amusing interactions with Tony.  And now 2014-Gamora is basically just here to compliment Nebula's story.

I think that's a pretty interesting pay off if you're a fan of the character or of Karen Gillian.

A Game of Endings

Avengers Endgame was great, I've already seen it twice now so I know it can hold up, historically second viewings have always been my most critical ones.  I wanted to celebrate that good news before getting into what this post is actually about.

I haven't watched Game of Thrones since season 4, but after watching a plurality of Video Essays and rants about the ending I get the sense that I'm generally inclined agree with mostly all of the criticisms.  People hating on letting the North be independent makes me uncomfortable but that's no where near the main event of all the complaining.

There are however two things that are a part of this discussion I feel inclined to disagree with.

The fact that I've seen more then one person say they can't enjoy the early seasons they used to love anymore.  This is something I've already talked about more directly in the context of Anime, my fundamental disagreement with Glass Reflection's The Ending is Paramount video.

Thing is I've never really been disappointed by a bad or imperfect ending because I know better then to expect it to be great.  I know that the longer it takes to get to the ending the more impossible it is it'll feel truly satisfying.  But even in the case of a single season 24 episode show like Romeo+Juliet my frustration with the last two episodes cannot take away how much I loved the first 22.

I do love great endings when they happen, and Avengers Endgame manages to top even the Anime Endings I find highly satisfying (Code Geass R2 is still the best ending I've ever seen in Anime) because it managed to pull it off even though it was over a Decade in building.

In order for my overall opinion of something I started out liking to become even mediocre much less bad the decline has to begin very early.  In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion it was as soon as Asuka came in things started to decline, the literal End of Evangelion being utterly irredeemable was not enough on it's own.

The second Issue I have is everyone feeling so confident the eventual ending of the A Song of Ice and Fire books will be very well executed even if at first glance it looks like the same basic ending. I'm certain their ending will also be unsatisfying.  I'm not even confident the final book will ever get written at all.

It's possible of course that now people will praise the books' ending just for being different then how the show ended, or that even if it is genuinely better executed it'll be because it had the benefit of seeing how the show's ending was critiqued. Which means Martin should perhaps be eternally grateful the TV show ended how it did.

I do think Martin has a basic idea of where he wants the story to go, and maybe he gave the gist of it to the show's writers.  But his taking forever to write even the second to last book tells me he has no idea of how to actually get there.  And I feel the same way about Berserk, the insane confidence of some Otaku who think the Mangaka has some brilliant ending perfectly mapped out when it's taking him over 30 years to get there is laughable to me.

Meaning much of the core criticism of the show's ending could easily be equally applicable to the books, forcing the characters to a predetermined end even if it doesn't organically fit their journey, it's just the specifics that would be different.  This problem has never been unique to adaptations, Star Trek Voyager's finale had the same core issue, as SFDebris explained they stubbornly stuck to a finale they wrote at the same time they wrote the pilot.

Of course part of why I doubt I'd like the Books' ending any better is how for me Game of Thrones went wrong a lot sooner then it did for them.  I loved the first 2 seasons, even mostly liked season 3, which is more then enough to indefinitely give my mind an overall positive association for the brand.  But season 4 is where the show lost me.  Most people at the soonest see the very end of season 4 as the first warning sign, but overall it's when the show ran out of book material they started not liking it.

The show had some differences from the books even in season 1, and from what I've heard I think I'm inclined to like the show better in at least that season/book's case.  I mean superficially I'd have preferred the books much more over-sized Iron Throne, but the more meaningful changes I'm glad they changed.

So it seems like if anything I'm inclined to prefer the show to the books.

Many critics of the final season say they are not in concept against Dani's heel turn and they are confident Martin is going to "character develop" it better.  For me Dani being set up as a righteous leader is core to what I was liking, and the seeds of her ruthlessness being planted was part of why season 4 turned me off.

If Martin saw "The Return of the King" trope turning out to be a bad thing as the core of his deconstructive narrative, then he shouldn't have made that King a Queen, because to me choosing to "deconstruct" the Messianic Archetype when you give it to a woman is inherently sexist.  I crave seeing that narrative played straight but with a Queen and that's why I loved Krista/Historia's story-line in Seasons 2 and 3 of Attack on Titan.

So even if Dani turning evil genocidal maniac makes more sense in the books I would still inherently hate it.

Honestly I'd like it if it's Jon Snow who turns evil after finding out he was the rightful heir all along, that would be a far better deconstruction of that trope to me.  He's the one who's journey in the first 4 seasons seems like what modern audiences are inclined to consider the most acceptable version of that Trope, like Aragon as a Ranger but with even more humility and hardship.  So deconstructing the expectation that that inherently makes a good person much less a good leader would be far more subversive.   It'd also Subvert the show's internal expectation that the Starks are always good.

But like with the Dani debate you'd have to execute it properly and not make it seem like a switch was flipped out of nowhere.